


Pour One Out

by AMyosotis



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Art, Comic, Gen, artwork, comic format, the major character death warning's just for bro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2021-02-08 01:51:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21468100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMyosotis/pseuds/AMyosotis
Summary: DAVE: okDAVE: soDAVE: …DAVE: i know we talked about some of this before right butDAVE: i guess sometimes i wonderDAVE: i get that the dude was fucked up ok i get that bro never had the emotional capacity to be anything other than the world’s shittiest guardianDAVE: but then why did he keep me?DIRK: …DAVE: i mean why put all that effort into a kidDave and Dirk have a heart-to-heart at Bro’s long-belated funeral.
Relationships: Dave Strider & Dirk Strider
Comments: 18
Kudos: 84





	Pour One Out

DIRK: Do you want to talk about it?  
DAVE:  
DAVE:  
DAVE:  
DIRK: I’d want you to talk to me about it, if it would help you.  
DAVE: uh  
DAVE: well  
DAVE: …  
DAVE: are you sure?  
DIRK: Yes. I’m sure.  
DAVE: ok  
DAVE: so  
DAVE:  
DAVE: i know we talked about some of this before right but  
DAVE: i guess sometimes i wonder  
DAVE: i get that the dude was fucked up ok i get that bro never had the emotional capacity to be anything other than the world’s shittiest guardian  
DAVE: but then why did he keep me?  
DIRK: …  
DAVE: i mean why put all that effort into a kid  
DAVE: not that he did in normal ways  
DAVE: i dont know how i avoided being permanently stunted by a devastating nutritional deficiency  
DAVE: good old aj must have saved me an apple a day keeps the doctor away a glass of shitty overly sugared concentrate and water somehow takes care of all the vitamins and minerals a growing boy needs i guess  
DAVE: but he did all this training stuff to make me his protege or sidekick or whatever  
DAVE: always flash stepping around the place and beating me up and occasionally dumping puppet schlong all over me  
DAVE: the guy was like a ghost in his own home to keep up the ineffable cool guy ninja act and i couldnt get why hed do that for me for the longest time  
DAVE: and then i realized  
DAVE: (sorry for this rant btw im about to drop a shit ton of lame feelings but thats what funerals or whatever are for right)  
DAVE: it wasnt for me i was for him

DAVE: he would have kept it up without me but whats the point of being the coolest guy on earth if no one knows how cool you are right  
DAVE: i wasnt his fucking protege i was just his audience of one which of course the grand supreme ironic puppet master would have  
DAVE: so invested in being inscrutable that to have more than a single person get how cool he is would wreck his sick flow  
DAVE: and i fed back into it i was just so easy i wanted him to be cool and for us to be cool so much  
DAVE: i wanted what was happening to be ok  
DIRK: ……  
DAVE: but i dont really understand his bigger motivations even now even with how much weve talked about him and what he did  
DAVE: so i guess what im doing here by uncomfortably blathering on about my weird abusive guardian like when vriska just sits down with you and talks about how her literal gigantic monster spider mother would make her kill other kids and bring them to her as food  
DAVE: and that definitely made her the strongest coolest troll of all and then she just pats you on your back and calls you useless and says it was a good talk  
DAVE: man side note sometimes the trolls make me feel pretty stupid for angsting over a guardian that only bought me delicious unhealthy food and music supplies and swords and stuff  
DAVE: even if they were shitty i know thats not how it works but sometimes i feel like im overreacting  
DIRK: I can assure you, your feelings are a completely valid reaction.  
DAVE: right um thanks  
DAVE: weirdly supportive alternate universe version of bro  
DIRK: Dirk.  
DAVE: yeah sorry that was weird of me i know youre not him  
DAVE: (god this is weird i shouldnt be asking you this)

DAVE: ok well  
DAVE: i guess what im trying to get at is  
DAVE: do you have any idea what was going on in his marble like featureless adult head?  
DAVE: because karkat tells me i should just accept that ill never understand his motives fully and you cant really understand everyone fully and looking forward is more important than looking behind you  
DAVE: and lets be real here hes actually a fucking master of this emotional bullshit from struggling through his own quagmire of issues concerning the motivations of not only other people but himself from all over the timeline  
DAVE: but i still just  
DAVE: i feel like i need to know like i should know  
DAVE: no one knew him better than me but you might know things i dont and i cant just leave that poor pomeranian napping away no matter how much beauty sleep it gets itll still look like a yappy drowned gremlin the second it starts raining so  
DAVE: whats the point  
DAVE:  
DIRK:  
DAVE: yeah

DIRK: Well.  
DIRK:  
DIRK:  
DIRK:  
DIRK:  
DAVE: you dont have to  
DIRK: No, I really do.  
DIRK: Sorry, I mean, it’s fine. I just need to figure out how to word this.  
DAVE: …ok  
DIRK:  
DIRK:  
DIRK:  
DIRK: OK.  
DIRK: I should own up to a few things to start.  
DIRK: I could blame it on my title, but that would be bullshit, because apparently there’s no distinction between who you are as a person and what the game needs you to be. It’s one of those paradox space things that you probably understand better than me.  
DIRK: The thing about me is, I project too much. I projectile vomit my projections all over everything and everyone around me. That was probably amplified by growing up almost completely alone in the middle of the fucking ocean, surrounded by ample shiny screens and robo parts to build reflections of myself out of, which your Bro didn’t have.  
DIRK: But from what I understand he had a spooky possessed version of Lil Cal with him straight out of the ecto-embryo, corrupting him, and that seems a lot worse.  
DIRK: I’ve got this splintering, obsessive-compulsive need to dissect my self-identity and break it apart and reconstruct it.  
DIRK: But at least I’m still fundamentally me.  
DIRK: Your Bro was probably both him, and Lil Cal, to a certain extent – possessed by his bad juju.  
DIRK: Which isn’t an excuse exactly, you had Cal in your dreams and didn’t end up that fucked up – but a Prince of Heart would be especially susceptible to that sort of influence, that kind of possession. His self-identity was pre-broken, so it must have been like someone with a suppressed immune system licking the fuck out of a doorknob. Just slobbering all over it.  
DIRK: And he didn’t have anyone to tell him not to lick doorknobs.  
DAVE: ha gross  
DIRK: Well what I’m trying to say is, we’re really not normal, the way we crashed in on meteors like some low budget alien invasion. And not just us, but your universe’s versions of me, and Roxy, and Jake, and Jane – they were all terrible at being normal humans in fundamentally basic ways. John had a bit of a generational buffer, but you and Rose and Jade did not have normal lives.  
DIRK: Growing up as a feral meteor baby without parents, improbably surviving due to paradox space bullshit like a loony toons character dodging life-threatening Acme products left and right on their plot armor pogo-stick, you don’t learn how to have basic human relationship skills, like proper boundaries or how to be physically affectionate with others. And that really matters.  
DIRK: The alternate version of you left me some basic bitch robots with the shittiest coding I’d ever seen, but they did the absolute necessities, physical contact and turning on the TV so I could hear human speech and learn it myself. And their parts meant I could eventually build more advanced robo-bros for essential physical companionship, like reserved fist-bumps.  
DIRK: Rose’s house had some beta-Earth psychology books about how during childhood development you need love and hugs and shit or you’ll curl up and die, and thank god my Bro knew some of that. But it looks like your Bro never got that as a kid, and he survived by curling up around the things he hyper-fixated on instead, saw them as what was important, didn’t learn how to interact with other humans right.  
DIRK: At least Lil Cal was plush, that’s a lot more huggable than a robot.  
DIRK: ………  
DIRK: Jesus, in retrospect his obsession with plush and mine with robots is pretty fucking understandable.  
DIRK: Anyway. Crazy realizations about myself non-withstanding. I think you’re right that you were an audience to him, but I don’t think that’s everything you were. Or even most of what you were.  
DIRK: From what you’ve said about the tiny ass shades he gave you, the way he trained you, how he introduced you to his other hobbies – it was a sort of really fucked up mentoring. He was bringing you up on all the things he cared about. The things he might have wanted for himself from a guardian, if he had had one. Those things just didn’t include normal human to human companionship.  
DIRK: I think by then he was too possessed, and self-absorbed, and projected himself on you too much, to do anything but that.  
DIRK: And in retrospect, he must have also had some weird idea of what was coming SBURB-wise. Some sort of paradox-spacetime mumbo-jumbo bullshit that made its way back to him on Earth Beta, given that he was prepared enough to cut a mother-fucking meteor in half.  
DIRK: So I think he was also training you for the game, or whatever wild apocalypse scenario he thought was coming, anyway. He wanted you to be strong, and survive. He did whatever he could to let you survive, including eventually dying to try and protect you.

DIRK: Jesus this is weird. Just a side note. This is really weird to look at.  
DAVE: you think this is weird?  
DAVE: try looking a hundred dead versions of yourself in their weird lavaheat jellified eyes  
DAVE: id find them around every other goddamn corner in lohac  
DAVE: fucking tripping hazards  
DIRK: Jesus.  
DAVE:  
DAVE: yeah  
DIRK: God. It’s like this game’s actual goal was to fuck you up as much as possible. The birth of a new universe was just a sick bonus gift, a cosmic, universal BOGO.

DIRK: I wonder if he had any idea of that. Probably not, since it’s not actually true, the universe’s reproduction was of course the cosmic point and our mental scars were just the shitty bonus soap sample no one really wants that ends up collecting dust in your downstairs bathroom wicker guest basket. Still.  
DIRK: Not to toot my own shiny, well-polished brass horn, but I’m pretty smart. So he probably was, too.  
DIRK: And so are you. You’re different, like me and him.  
DIRK: And that probably would have made it… worse. All the projecting I mean.  
DIRK: He treated you like he would have wanted to be treated as a kid, but it was in retrospect, from the perspective of an adult totally fucked up by isolation and an incredibly powerful cursed puppet, and so he fucked it up. But he definitely cared.  
DIRK: Or at least – god. I want him to have cared.  
DIRK: I mean, I do hate myself. I was always looking for something to sacrifice myself for.  
DIRK: But I still think the fact that he died for you mattered. And if I want him to have cared about you, then I think that must mean he really did care about you.  
DAVE: ...  
DIRK: I don’t know. I don’t know, I project too much. He projected too much.  
DIRK: But the little shades, dude.  
DIRK: I mean even though I grew up alone, even more alone than your Bro was, I wanted connection. So, so badly, out there in the middle of the fucking endless salt water and sun and sky. We all wanted that desperately, besides John and Jane I guess, who kind of had the opposite problem being smothered by their parents.  
DIRK: But the rest of us – we were all reaching out ham-handedly towards each other on Pesterchum. Making up for what we never had at the same time we fucked up at giving it to each other because we never learned it properly.  
DIRK: Our respective quartets probably would have been beyond fucked without John and Jane to remind us what being normal is.  
DIRK: But even so, we wanted connection. I mean, fucking look at this objectively absolutely shitty tattoo I’ve had done.

DAVE: jesus i still cant believe you have that  
DIRK: I know right. But I idolized my Bro, and I loved Jake, and I needed to force something tangible to be on our skin forever to reassure myself I had those connections. To prove my love by making it physical. I loved this when I got it, and I still fucking love it, because it’s proof that I love my Bro and Jake and I loved each other. I can’t help loving it.  
DIRK: So I can’t help but be sure that he loved you. That he couldn’t help loving you.  
DIRK: But I am sorry he did this to you.  
DIRK: ………  
DIRK: And I’m also sorry, because there’s a calculating part of me I cannot shut off that says this is the alpha timeline that worked, and it’s because you needed to be this prepared. This on edge and reactive, and used to games and planning and able to – to look your own death in the face over and over, ice cold, shades on.  
DIRK: I think he would have been proud of you. Too proud, not understanding you shouldn’t have to be that way, because it’s all he could have wanted, growing up wrapped around his cursed version of Lil Cal.  
DAVE: …  
DIRK: I don’t think he would have really gotten what you have with Karkat.  
DIRK: But I do think he would still love you, if he were alive right now.

DIRK: I dunno, from what I can grasp he had some weird sexual hangups too, and that bled into his puppet thing, and he always had Lil Cal on him. And he probably had OCD like me, so maybe he just didn’t want to be too near you, infect you with all his bullshit.  
DIRK: I mean.  
DIRK: Sometimes I think that I should leave everyone I care about totally alone, because if I don’t I’ll completely take over their lives and make them all about me, infecting them like a self-centered constantly replicating virus.  
DIRK: Or hell, I should just never speak to them again so they’ll be spared my apparently unwanted rap breakdowns on why Rainbow Dash is simply and objectively the best fictional pony there is or ever was.

DAVE: pfft  
DAVE: maybe ill let you slap that beat down for me as a birthday present one day  
DAVE: one (1) coupon for an hours worth of me no sass uninterrupted listening to your rainbows and magic pony bullshit rhythmical analysis  
DIRK: Dave you have absolutely no idea how much that means to me, or how many times I imagined asking my Bro about his would-be opinions on My Little Pony as a kid.  
DIRK: If you write me that coupon scratch out the no sass uninterrupted part, but be prepared to slam some buttery as fuck popcorn chased with rainbow icees beyond saturated in sugar while you watch at least the entire first season with me.  
DAVE: well i mean we do have eternity might as well save the real emmy winners for later right  
DIRK: It pains me to admit that yes, despite being nominated for multiple Daytime Emmy Awards, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has never actually won an Emmy.  
DIRK: But to be clear Dave, this is not a joke; if you do not stop me I will drag you off to watch a bunch of colorful animated ponies raucously rumpus around learning wholesome life lessons immediately after this, as I have little to no restraint in this particular area.  
DIRK: But uh, god, I actually do need to show some restraint in that area and shut up about ponies for once in my life.  
DIRK: Because I really want to get back to what I was saying before, because this is important.  
DIRK: What I’m trying to say here in my own rambling, constantly inserting my own issues into the conversation way is, upon some reflection I believe that he deeply cared about you.  
DIRK: I really think that he was trying his best, to give you everything that he thought was the best in the world.  
DIRK: And I think that he was trying to do everything he could to raise you to survive and make it, because he loved you.  
DIRK: But he didn’t want to wreck you, so he kept his distance because he hated himself, and that plus his very skewed tastes in what the best parts of the world were fucked you over more than he ever knew to know.

DIRK: So that’s,  
DIRK: That’s my best walloping jolly-good crack at it, as Jake would find a way to say approximately 1382% more ridiculous and antiquated than I can possibly simulate with my own vocabulary pool, limited as it is by appropriately high minimum coolness level requirements.  
DIRK: …  
DIRK: Don’t really know why he dumped hot puppet schlong all over you, but hey maybe that one’s supposed to always be a mystery for the ages.  
DAVE: …  
DAVE: yeah  
DAVE: he was one fuckin un-fucking-effable cool dude, thats for sure  
DAVE: well  
DAVE: thanks a lot dirk  
DAVE: not in the sarcastic thanks obama way in the elusive very difficult to express when you wear shades as sick as ours genuine way  
DAVE: i don’t feel like i learned anything new here no offense  
DAVE: but i do feel like… I snapped some loose puzzle pieces together with a couple very satisfying and relieving clicks  
DAVE: and also ruled out some of the weird shadowy shit that haunts my dreams every once in a while  
DAVE: flittering around in the back of my mind throwing out what ifs like a shitty shadow version of lil cal flickering around the apartment with knives behind his back  
DAVE: his theme music is just the normal lil cal theme played in reverse and slowed down by 33% lazy as fuck sound design  
DAVE: 

DAVE: whatever the case my ishades may short out if they get any wetter than this  
DAVE: so lets call it a day here and pour one out for the ol bastard yeah  
DIRK: I can definitely say that he would not have liked being called old.  
DIRK: And if it existed in your universe, his favorite soda was undoubtably Slice. A damn shame I’m out of it.

DIRK: Anyway, for the old as balls extra asshole version of me I never met.  
DAVE: may you outgrow him in age but never assholeishness  
DIRK: May he finally figure out the CAPTCHA code for Slice, if he’s still powersliding around somewhere, off in the great dream bubble beyond.

DIRK:  
DIRK:  
DIRK: Oh, as an addendum, since we did just have a whole conversation about an AU version of myself absolutely fucking up your childhood by forcing you to constantly immerse yourself in his hyper-fixations, I think it would be remiss of me to not say that I was just kidding about the whole My Little Pony thing. And we should actually do something that you enjoy instead, after this.  
DAVE: oh fuck no dude  
DAVE: im so hyped up to watch those stupid fucking ponies do their rainbow magic friendship horseshit are you kidding me  
DIRK: Really? I wouldn’t want you to watch it just for my sake.  
DAVE: look i get what youre saying here  
DAVE: but ive osmosised up enough emotional intelligence from karkat to understand that a parental figure forcing you to exclusively act the way they act and enjoy the things they enjoy under extreme emotional and physical duress is very different from a sibling getting all souped up about their favorite show and trying to make you watch it  
DAVE: besides if I dont like it i wont be afraid to tell you and then we can wrestle rambunctiously for the remote like a couple of normal brothers

DIRK: Ha, OK. That’d be cool then.

DAVE: look either way you better not cheat me out of the pony rap you mentioned before  
DAVE: if you tease that tantalizingly multi-colored feather on a string in front of me just to cruelly jerk it away out of sight and so presumably out of existence since im pretty sure cats dont have object permanence i will absolutely decapitate you and this time it will absolutely be judged as just so

**Author's Note:**

> Author’s notes: Credit to Hussie for most of the art – I just sloppily edited panels and slapped Dave & Dirk onto them.
> 
> If you liked this, I’ve got a bigger Dave-centric fanfic, centered on his time in LOHAC. It gets into the moral & philosophical implications of all those pesky Dead Daves and their doomed timelines, and it’s filled with even more dumb Strider-style metaphors than you can shake a comically oversized, horrendously expensive gift shop rainstick at! Read here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16828876


End file.
